Greetings from wet and wooly Dallas! The thunder and lightning were startling for those of us unaccustomed to rain, but our attendees were unfazed. They showed up and asked our speakers great questions on everything from addressable TV to building data lakes.

On a visit to his friend’s home, Forrester VP and principal analyst Joe Stanhope shared that his five-year-old godson called out to Alexa to play a particular artist, asking Alexa to skip over songs until the voice assistant landed on the track he wanted. This is what our youngest consumers are used to, underscoring the point that voice search is the next major marketing battleground.

If you thought that appealing to consumers across devices was tough, it will be even more challenging to become the single result a voice assistant returns when someone asks for the best restaurant in Arlington, TX, or the least expensive organic moisturizer.

Insight 2: Marketing and finance must see eye to eye

Remember when CMOs first started outspending CIOs, necessitating the alignment of IT and marketing? Now marketers must do the same with finance, showing this team their campaign analytics in a way that makes sense to them.

The challenge is, each team cares about different metrics, as I learned from one brand attendee. While marketers may care about return on ad spend and put it on a slide, finance teams need more granular metrics, such as marginal return on investment. This complicates an already complex measurement process.

This insight reminded me of the conversation I had with Tara-Nicholle Nelson. She shared on the RampUp podcast that the marketers who rise in the ranks are the ones who are fluent in the numbers and can clearly show why a particular marketing decision makes business sense. As another speaker, Jim Edgett, Head of Digital Ecosystem and Channels at GameStop put it, “You need to model whether the pearl is worth the dive.”

Insight 3: “TV will change in the next two years more than it has in the last fifty.”

Our final speaker, Jamie Power, COO of one2one media, shared this insight at the start of her presentation, “Navigating the Convergence of Digital and TV.” It’s hard to believe now that years ago, one metric brands cared about was tune-away, or the point when someone would change the channel or turn the TV off in the middle of a commercial.

Now, digital and TV teams are converging on the metrics that matter most to the business to drive holistic marketing plans forward. It’s certainly an exciting time to be an advertiser looking to optimize across channels and shape the customer experience in a way that delights the customer and makes business sense.